20121025

20121022

The last Presidential debate just finished, and it turns
out that I haven’t written anything about the election all year. It’s been hard
to find enough substance to meet my standards. I loved the three ring circus
that was the GOP primary (Herman Cain, any questions?), but we
all knew Romney was the inevitable nominee despite himself. The state of the
race to 270 Electoral College votes, and the hard work of turning out the
vanishingly small number of undecided voters in the handful of swing states is
beyond my expertise; I’ll leave that to Nate Silver. I just don’t have the time to evaluate in
detail the candidates’ platforms and policies; not that much detail is being
released. And besides, not that it’s any surprise to any of my readers, but I’m
a staunch cultural Democrat, in that I’m pro-women, pro-equality, anti-war,
living proof that America is not a Christian nation.

This isn’t likely to change: My earliest political
memories were 1) the Clinton-Lewinsky impeachment hearings 2) the 2000 election
and the Florida Supreme Court debacle, and 3) the entire motherfucking Bush administration, who’s epochal
combination of incompetence, arrogance, and short-sightedness left me unable to
find a single decent thing that was accomplished by the American government
from 2000-2008. As far as I’m concerned, anybody who campaigns with an “R”
after his or her name without renouncing George W. Bush and all his works is
entirely unworthy of respect.

Of course, just because I'm decided means that I can't have an opinion. And ((spoilers ahead)), that opinion is one of cynicism and disengagement.

I won’t be voting for Mitt Romney, as the Obama
endorsement from The
Salt Lake Tribune explains why in more or less the same language I’d use.
The constantly shifting positions, the refusal to share policy specifics, and
the very real probability that he holds a Randian ‘takers-vs-makers’ view of
society, as exhibited in his infamous 47%
comments, all serve to disqualify him from higher office.

On the other hand, I’m not really inclined towards Obama,
even after a strong showing in this last debate. What
I wrote this January is still true.

I supported Obama [in 2008] because I believed that he
could articulate a vision for American democracy in the 21st century.
I thought that the author of Dreams from my Father, the 2004
Democratic Convention Keynote, and the speech on Reverend
Wright, would be somebody who could inspire America in the same way that
Kennedy and Reagan did. We needed, and still need, inspiration more than any
specific policy solution. I believed that roused to action, the American people
would find their own solutions to major problems, like healthcare, energy,
education, and the war.

Instead, Barack Obama has presided over an ugly and
secretive government. It is a government that uses drones to kill terrorists on
the other side of the world, while making the absurd claim that “There hasn’t
been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency,
precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop,” (according to senior
counter-terrorism official John O. Brennan) despite ample
evidence to the contrary. It is a government that has failed to address
basic concerns about hidden risks and ‘shadow banks’ in the financial system.
And while the rancor and insanity of the
112th Congress is not Obama’s fault, the White House
is little better. On the Keystone XL
pipeline, and Plan
B birth control pill, the Obama administration has given the impression
that it does not make decisions based on evidence, or what he believes would be
right for the country, but what is most politically expedient.

I’d like a frank debate about jobs and the nature of work
in the 21st century, because humans are losing to machines. We
need to talk about communities and belonging, because our society is more
fluid, more free, and more alienating than ever before. We need to talk about war and peace, because
we have an absurdly
expensive white elephant of a military with no clear mission. And we need
to seriously talk about energy and sustainability, because we get precisely one
shot at technological civilization and the infrastructure that sustains us is
far from secure.

But none of this happened, because the conventional wisdom is
that voters care about pocketbook issues and the old staples of the culture
wars. The big issues and questions don’t fit neatly into the ideological frameworks of either party. If campaigning is mostly about repeating the right set of meaningless shibboleths until 51% of the voters decide to check the mark next to your name, then bringing up non-standard narratives is always a mistake. Who am I to criticize the electoral performance of Lee Atwater, Karl
Rove, James Carville, David Axelrod and all the other operatives who have honed
the tools of campaigning into a lethal arsenal. But if
we can’t talk about these political problems during a presidential campaign,
then when?

Go ahead and vote if you want to. I don’t really care
(unless you live in Ohio). Obama has been an adequate caretaker president at a
time when this nation needed so much more. Romney has failed to demonstrate
why he should have the job, and personally, I just don't like him. He fails the "who-would-I-like-to-have-a-beer-with" test. Hell, he even fails the coffee test. But the 2012 election isn't about politics or likability, at best, it's about administration. Sometimes, it seems like the most powerful man in the free world has all the independence of thought and action of a middle-school student treasurer.

20121019

Drones and the future of warfare are perennial interest
of mine. My previous
writing on drones was from the perspective of American politics and
military strategy. In brief, I argued that
the armed drone has proceeded in concert with bureaucratic institutions of the ‘kill
list’, from the context of democratic governance is dangerous because the
institutions involved are free of external oversight, and above all, that this
policy of ‘war by assassination’ developed without any form of public deliberation
or participation.

What I did not write about was the consequences of drones
on the ground, because I did not have that data, and would not presume to speak
for the perspectives of people who I don’t understand. A recent report, Living Under Drones, by the Human
Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School (Stanford Clinic)
and the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law (NYU Clinic),
has provided that data, in the form of 130 interviews with Pakistani residents
of the areas targeted by drones. I do not agree with all of the premises and
conclusions of the report, but they have rendered an invaluable service by
giving voice to an otherwise silenced population. I’d like to take a moment to
discuss what this report reveals about the strategy of the drone war, and how
that strategy can be improved.

The official word on the drone program, from
counter-terrorism advisor John
Brennan up to President
Obama himself, is that drones are legal, ethical, and above all, precise. Strikes
are conducted only on the best intelligence, on verified targets, in a manner
that avoids civilian casualties. The metaphor of the Global War on Terror is cancer;
terrorist cells must be cut out of the nation before they metastasize, and this
can be done without harming the integrity of the body politic.

The three strikes described in Living Under Drones paints a very different picture. The stories
differ in the details, but a common thread emerges as an attack on what the
administration claims to be terrorist activity is described by locals as just daily
life, including political council meetings and travel. The survivors, either
just outside the blast radius of the relatives of the decease, describe the
shock of the explosion, picking through ruined buildings for body parts, and
trying to rebuild what remains. What through the lens of a drone looks like a
terrorist, is to people in Waziristan a father, brother, son, economic
breadwinner, friend, or local elder. Every death reverberates through the
social fabric, individuals who are only weakly tied to legitimate targets in Al
Qaeda, the Taliban, or the Haqqani network.

Those who live under drones describe the experience as
one of fear amplified by uncertainty and helplessness into terror. “In the
words of one interviewee: ‘God knows whether they’ll strike us again or not.
But they’re always surveying us, they’re always over us, and you never know
when they’re going to strike and attack” (Living
Under Drones pg. 81). In practice,
drones are terror weapons, with unanticipated psychological effects beyond
their lethal impact. It is one thing for a democracy to avoid a debate on
whether or not certain ‘bad people’ can and should be killed; it is another
thing entirely to avoid that debate about whether a civilian population should
be terrorized in pursuit of that policy.

These opposing perspectives on drones matter, because
perspectives inform policy, which informs outcomes. If drones are truly surgical weapons, than
the matter at hand becomes identifying the relevant jihadist targets, and
eliminating enough of them to shatter their organizations, or doing it rapidly
enough to outpace their ability to regenerate, or simply staying at it at long
enough that they go away. Unfortunately, regardless of its (arguable) successes
in Waziristan, the proliferation of jihadist groups in Yemen, Libya,
and Syria
shows that years of this kind of ‘political surgery’ are not leading to
victory. Attrition is the last refuge of the defeated strategist.

Drawing from Unrestricted
Warfare, which presents the novel and profitable proposal “that the new
principles of war are no longer 'using armed force to compel the enemy to
submit to one's will,' but rather are 'using all means, including armed force
or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means
to compel the enemy to accept one's interests'", the problems of drones as
a terror weapon become clear. The object
of the drone campaign is not to surgically excise the Jihad, but to make the
population turn against them on the belief that fighting Al Qaeda is a better option than allowing them to exist among them, thereby inviting the drones.

This strategy is riddled with weaknesses and little
better than attrition. One strategic perspective views the Global War on Terror
as one front in the struggle between the New World Order and the New World
Disorder. Vis a vis futurist, sci-fi author, and guru Bruce Sterling and
Professor Thomas Barnett
of the Naval War College, there are places where the networks are open, the official
economy encompasses pretty much everything, and rule of law applies, (if you’re
reading this, you almost certainly live in one), and there are other places
where the infrastructure is poor, power is held by small networks of personal
charisma and authority, and the major economic activity is extortion,
smuggling, and drugs. Terrorists, by and large, come from places like this,
because they encourage the development of tightly-linked groups willing to kill.
These groups don’t have the organizational ability to project power much beyond
their neighborhood, but in rare circumstances they can hijack the
infrastructure of the New World Order (airliners and subways, for example) to
carry out mass attacks.

The point is that breaking up any particularly group is
irrelevant, because the pervasive lack of economic opportunity and broader
social meaning mean that places like these spawn terrorists, revolutionaries,
and criminals in the same way that a garbage pile spawns flies. The isolation
and provincialism of these places is hard to overstate, as interviews
with three would-be Pakistani suicide bombers reveals:

“The common thread between the lives of these youths was
their complete isolation from rest of the Pakistan and from the world at large.
The lack of access to TV, Internet, and formal education meant they were almost
completely oblivious to such massive events as 9/11, and as such they were
unaware of where and what exactly the United States was. One of the boys
mentioned that there was only one TV in their entire neighborhood, and even
that one didn't work half of the time. Their only access to information was the
radio, which has for years been dominated by the jihadists who were using the
name of Islam to mobilize the people.”

If ultimate victory in this war is to be achieved by
spreading the New World Order into the dark corners of the world, it is
unlikely that terrorizing the population into mass anxiety, killing local
leaders, and blowing up what infrastructure there is, is a fruitful step
towards that goal.

I’m going to be cynical here, and say that regardless of
its legality, ethics, or mass public opposition, the drone war is going to
continue. In a tactical sense, armed drones are simply too good at killing
terrorists for them to be abandoned as a technology. How then, might the
strategy be recovered?

Foucault, in his classic Discipline and Punish, wrote about the Panopticon as both a
physical structure and as a theory linking surveillance, punishment, and
discipline. For Foucault, the power of the panopiticon’s architecture was that
the possibility of being observed and punished at any time required the inmates
to act in accordance to the wishes of the overseer at all times. When the inmates fully
internalized the values of the overseer, and could be trusted to behave as he
wished without active involvement, they had become ‘disciplined’. In this
framework, the strategic aim of the Global War on Terror is extending American
discipline in regards to terrorists to local populations around the world.

The theory of the panopticon is relatively simply, but
its application is anything but.
Terrorist networks use intelligence
tradecraft to avoid detection, making them elusive targets for
surveillance. And from the perspective of civilians on the ground, the drone
strikes appear random, leading to learned helplessness
rather than an anti-terrorist discipline. I believe that to be effective, each
drone strike must be linked to a clear American policy and ideology; and to an
opportunity to for potential change behaviors and allegiances before being
attacked. The drone war would become slower, more deliberative, and above all,
more transparent.

Is this proposal ideal? Absolutely not. I’m not even sure
if it’s a good idea. But what I am sure of is that the current strategies of the drone war as I
understand them are not strategies that are capable of winning, and that
endurance in pursuit of defeat is no virtue.

20121007

Recently, ASU launched the new Center for Science and the Imagination to use
science fiction in serious ways. Things like CSI are literally unbelievable;
they could only happen at ASU, and it’s why I’m a grad student here. I’m look
forward to working with the new center, and I have some ideas.

In the words of the center’s director, Ed Finn:

Our mission is to foster creative and
ambitious thinking about the future. We want to bring writers, artists,
scholars, scientists and many others together in collaboration on bold visions
for a better future. But more than this, we want to share a sense of agency
about the future, to get everyone on the plane thinking about how our choices
inflect the spectrum of possibilities before us.

Right now, the center is bringing people together around
big visions for the future, the most prominent of which is Neal Stephenson’s Giant Space
Tower. Unlike a space elevator, which would require tens of thousands of
kilometers of catbon
nanotube fiber at an unprecedented production scale, Neal’s tower is only
10-20km tall, and built out of conventional materials like steal. However, by
getting a launch platform above the thickest parts of Earth’s atmosphere,
rockets could reach orbit much more efficiently, opening up new frontiers in
space travel. The idea is that as a potential rallying point for
interdisciplinary studies in engineering, sustainability, the politics of
siting the tower, economics of operation, design of human living quarters high
in what climbers call the ‘death zone’. It’s a big vision, but are we really
thinking about choices and possibilities?

The tower is a fascinating project in many aspects, but
as a spaceflight
critic, I have my doubts. The tower is an interesting idea, but it’s
closest analog isn’t the Apollo program, it’s large scale infrastructure like
the Panama
Canal, which was at its time an incredibly ambitious and fraught
undertaking, cost $375 million, was politically tied to the imperial domination
of Central America and moneyed shipping interests, and killed tens of thousands
of workers. While it was a bridge between worlds in its time, and a worthy and
impressive project, these days, its most enduring legacy is not heroic
engineering, but cheap consumer goods and the Panamax ship standard.

Science fiction asks us to dream big, but history tells
us we should be cautious. The legacies of innovation are rarely what we think
they will be. The most important technologies are rarely the most impressive
ones, human genome projects and particle accelerators and rocket ships. The
science and technology that impacts us the most are quiet, omnipresent,
invisible, things like air
conditioning and standardized
forms, forms of transportation that are cheap, efficient, and safe, buildings
that stay up in storms and earthquakes, and the millions of other things that
modern living requires, and which we notice only when they break.

We live in an era characterized by technologies, and as Langdon
Winner noted in his classicThe Whale and The Reactor,
these artifacts have politics, but their values, costs and benefits, and forms
of responsibility disappear into a fog of engineering details accessible only
to experts. The architectures of technological systems structure and direct our
lives in subtle ways, and yet we lack good tools to evaluate these technologies.
I can think of three primary ways we approach technology: elegance, expense,
and inertia. Technophiles love the newest most technically sweet solution or
gadget for its own sake. Accountants are concerned with how much it will cost,
and who will pay. And most people approach technology from a position of minimizing
disruptions in how they live their lives, and interoperability with the current
standard.

When people to come together to discuss technologies, the
result is all too frequently confusion because they are coming from mutually
incomprehensible perspectives. Rationality is not a fair and even-handed way of
adjudicating between perspectives; demanding rationality is a way of enforcing the
use of only one perspective. Cost-benefit analysis and similar “rational”
techniques of technology assessment and governance take in only a very small
slice of the human experience. For democrats, people who believe that everybody
should have a fair say in the development of the community, this
ungovernability of technology is a perennial problem.

Instead of bemoaning the perennial irrationality of the
public, or elite decision-makers, or the morons who programmed the menu system
on my internet enabled BluRay player, I think we should look for a different
way of communicating. People may be irrational, in that they do things other
than how we would have done then, but their actions make sense internally. They
are never unreasonable.

(1) Humans are
essentially story tellers; (2) the paradigmatic mode of human decision-making
and communication is “good reasons” which vary in form among communication
situations, genres, and media; (3) the production and practice of goods reasons
is ruled by matters of history, biography, culture, and character… (4)
rationality is determined by the nature of persons as narrative beings-their
inherent awareness of narrative probability, what constitutes a coherent story,
and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, whether the stories
they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives…
(5) the world is a set of stories which must be chosen among to live the good
life in a process of continual recreation.

In short, good
reasons are the stuff of stories, the means by which humans realize their
nature as reasoning valuing animals. The philosophical ground of the narrative
paradigm is ontology. The materials of the narrative paradigm are symbols,
signs of consubstantiation, and good reasons, the communicative expressions of
social reality.

We need to bring reasons to the forefront, and stories
are some of the densest, most fruitful areas for discovering reasons. We need
to start taking stories seriously, and specifically stories about technology.
We need more people telling stories about technology, better stories about
technology, and better channels for getting good stories out there. And for
better or worse, science fiction is the genre of stories that deal with
technology and the future. As Clark Miller and Ira Bennet, two professors at CSPOwrote, “Science-fiction
is technology assessment for the rest of us.”

Jay Oglivy, a
futurist with the Global Business Network, argues that, “Part of the role of
futurists… should therefore be to articulate in an understandable and appealing
way images of a better future. We need an antidote to Blade Runner, a foil for A
Clockwork Orange, a better sequel to 1984,
a truly humanized Animal Farm.” I
hope that the new Center for Science and Inquiry can take up this challenge,
creating a community of interdisciplinary scholars and methods to use science
fiction to articulate, discuss, and create this better world. Anything less
would be a betrayal of our ambitions.